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This article claims the software that runs the back end of either 35% or 80%-95% (depending on which part of the article you read) has been compromised, and that the adult industry is hushing this up. Like many of these sorts of stories, there’s no evidence that the bad guys have the personal information database. The vulnerability only means that they could have it.
Does anyone know about this?
Slashdot thread.
I just did a Q&A on the Freakonomics blog. Nothing regular readers of this blog haven’t heard before, but it was fun all the same. There’s also a Slashdot thread on the Q&A.
Computer security is hard. Software, computer and network security are all ongoing battles between attacker and defender. And in many cases the attacker has an inherent advantage: He only has to find one network flaw, while the defender has to find and fix every flaw.
Cryptography is an exception. As long as you don’t write your own algorithm, secure encryption is easy. And the defender has an inherent mathematical advantage: Longer keys increase the amount of work the defender has to do linearly, while geometrically increasing the amount of work the attacker has to do.
Unfortunately, cryptography can’t solve most computer-security problems. The one problem cryptography can solve is the security of data when it’s not in use. Encrypting files, archives—even entire disks—is easy.
All of this makes it even more amazing that Her Majesty’s Revenue & Customs in the United Kingdom lost two disks with personal data on 25 million British citizens, including dates of birth, addresses, bank-account information and national insurance numbers. On the one hand, this is no bigger a deal than any of the thousands of other exposures of personal data we’ve read about in recent years—the U.S. Veteran’s Administration loss of personal data of 26 million American veterans is an obvious similar event. But this has turned into Britain’s privacy Chernobyl.
Perhaps encryption isn’t so easy after all, and some people could use a little primer. This is how I protect my laptop.
There are several whole-disk encryption products on the market. I use PGP Disk’s Whole Disk Encryption tool for two reasons. It’s easy, and I trust both the company and the developers to write it securely. (Disclosure: I’m also on PGP Corp.’s Technical Advisory Board.)
Setup only takes a few minutes. After that, the program runs in the background. Everything works like before, and the performance degradation is negligible. Just make sure you choose a secure password—PGP’s encouragement of passphrases makes this much easier—and you’re secure against leaving your laptop in the airport or having it stolen out of your hotel room.
The reason you encrypt your entire disk, and not just key files, is so you don’t have to worry about swap files, temp files, hibernation files, erased files, browser cookies or whatever. You don’t need to enforce a complex policy about which files are important enough to be encrypted. And you have an easy answer to your boss or to the press if the computer is stolen: no problem; the laptop is encrypted.
PGP Disk can also encrypt external disks, which means you can also secure that USB memory device you’ve been using to transfer data from computer to computer. When I travel, I use a portable USB drive for backup. Those devices are getting physically smaller—but larger in capacity—every year, and by encrypting I don’t have to worry about losing them.
I recommend one more complication. Whole-disk encryption means that anyone at your computer has access to everything: someone at your unattended computer, a Trojan that infected your computer and so on. To deal with these and similar threats I recommend a two-tier encryption strategy. Encrypt anything you don’t need access to regularly—archived documents, old e-mail, whatever—separately, with a different password. I like to use PGP Disk’s encrypted zip files, because it also makes secure backup easier (and lets you secure those files before you burn them on a DVD and mail them across the country), but you can also use the program’s virtual-encrypted-disk feature to create a separately encrypted volume. Both options are easy to set up and use.
There are still two scenarios you aren’t secure against, though. You’re not secure against someone snatching your laptop out of your hands as you’re typing away at the local coffee shop. And you’re not secure against the authorities telling you to decrypt your data for them.
The latter threat is becoming more real. I have long been worried that someday, at a border crossing, a customs official will open my laptop and ask me to type in my password. Of course I could refuse, but the consequences might be severe—and permanent. And some countries—the United Kingdom, Singapore, Malaysia—have passed laws giving police the authority to demand that you divulge your passwords and encryption keys.
To defend against both of these threats, minimize the amount of data on your laptop. Do you really need 10 years of old e-mails? Does everyone in the company really need to carry around the entire customer database? One of the most incredible things about the Revenue & Customs story is that a low-level government employee mailed a copy of the entire national child database to the National Audit Office in London. Did he have to? Doubtful. The best defense against data loss is to not have the data in the first place.
Failing that, you can try to convince the authorities that you don’t have the encryption key. This works better if it’s a zipped archive than the whole disk. You can argue that you’re transporting the files for your boss, or that you forgot the key long ago. Make sure the time stamp on the files matches your claim, though.
There are other encryption programs out there. If you’re a Windows Vista user, you might consider BitLocker. This program, embedded in the operating system, also encrypts the computer’s entire drive. But it only works on the C: drive, so it won’t help with external disks or USB tokens. And it can’t be used to make encrypted zip files. But it’s easy to use, and it’s free.
This essay previously appeared on Wired.com.
EDITED TO ADD (12/14): Lots of people have pointed out that the free and open-source program TrueCrypt is a good alternative to PGP Disk. I haven’t used or reviewed the program at all.
Every year SANS publishes a list of the 20 most important vulnerabilities. It’s always a great list, and this year is no different:
The threat landscape is very dynamic, which in turn makes it necessary to adopt newer security measures. Just over the last year, the kinds of vulnerabilities that are being exploited are very different from the ones being exploited in the past. Here are some observations:
- Operating systems have fewer vulnerabilities that can lead to massive Internet worms. For instance, during 2002-2005, Microsoft Windows worms like Blaster, Nachi, Sasser and Zotob infected a large number of systems on the Internet. There have not been any new large-scale worms targeting Windows services since 2005. On the other hand, vulnerabilities found anti-virus, backup or other application software, can result in worms. Most notable was the worm exploiting the Symantec anti-virus buffer overflow flaw last year.
- We have seen significant growth in the number of client-side vulnerabilities, including vulnerabilities in browsers, in office software, in media players and in other desktop applications. These vulnerabilities are being discovered on multiple operating systems and are being massively exploited in the wild, often to drive recruitment for botnets.
- Users who are allowed by their employers to browse the Internet have become a source of major security risk for their organizations. A few years back securing servers and services was seen as the primary task for securing an organization. Today it is equally important, perhaps even more important, to prevent users having their computers compromised via malicious web pages or other client-targeting attacks.
- Web application vulnerabilities in open-source as well as custom-built applications account for almost half the total number of vulnerabilities being discovered in the past year. These vulnerabilities are being exploited widely to convert trusted web sites into malicious servers serving client-side exploits and phishing scams.
- The default configurations for many operating systems and services continue to be weak and continue to include default passwords. As a result, many systems have been compromised via dictionary and brute-force password guessing attacks in 2007!
- Attackers are finding more creative ways to obtain sensitive data from organizations. Therefore, it is now critical to check the nature of any data leaving an organization’s boundary.
Much, much more information at the link.
Just put up a password strength meter and encourage people to submit their passwords for testing. You might want to collect names and e-mail addresses, too.
For the record, here’s how to choose a secure password:
So if you want your password to be hard to guess, you should choose something not on any of the root or appendage lists. You should mix upper and lowercase in the middle of your root. You should add numbers and symbols in the middle of your root, not as common substitutions. Or drop your appendage in the middle of your root. Or use two roots with an appendage in the middle.
Even something lower down on PRTK’s dictionary list—the seven-character phonetic pattern dictionary—together with an uncommon appendage, is not going to be guessed. Neither is a password made up of the first letters of a sentence, especially if you throw numbers and symbols in the mix. And yes, these passwords are going to be hard to remember, which is why you should use a program like the free and open-source Password Safe to store them all in.
EDITED TO ADD (12/5): Note that I am not actually accusing them of harvesting passwords, only pointing out that you could harvest passwords that way.
…I thought it would be interesting to find out the account password. WordPress stores raw MD5 hashes in the user database…. As with any respectable hash function, it is believed to be computationally infeasible to discover the input of MD5 from an output. Instead, someone would have to try out all possible inputs until the correct output is discovered.
[…]
Instead, I asked Google. I found, for example, a genealogy page listing people with the surname “Anthony”, and an advert for a house, signing off “Please Call for showing. Thank you, Anthony”. And indeed, the MD5 hash of “Anthony” was the database entry for the attacker. I had discovered his password.
A 2003 “Camp Delta Standard Operating Procedures” manual has been leaked to the Internet. This is the same manual that the ACLU has unsuccessfully sued the government to get a copy of. Others can debate the legality of some of the procedures; I’m interested in comments about the security.
See, for example, this quote on page 27.3:
(b) Upon arrival will enter the gate by entering the number (1998) in the combination lock
(c) Proceed to the junction box with the number (7012-83) Breaker Box and open the boc. The number for the lock on the breaker box is (224).
I previously wrote about Dan Egerstad, a security researcher who ran a Tor anonymity network and was able to sniff some pretty impressive usernames and passwords.
Swedish police arrested him:
About 9am Egerstad walked downstairs to move his car when he was accosted by the officers in a scene “taken out of a bad movie”, he said in an email interview.
“I got a couple of police IDs in my face while told that they are taking me in for questioning,” he said.
But not before the agents, who had staked out his house in undercover blue and grey Saabs (“something that screams cop to every person in Sweden from miles away”), searched his apartment and confiscated computers, CDs and portable hard drives.
“They broke my wardrobe, short cutted my electricity, pulled out my speakers, phone and other cables having nothing to do with this and been touching my bookkeeping, which they have no right to do,” he said.
While questioning Egerstad at the station, the police “played every trick in the book, good cop, bad cop and crazy mysterious guy in the corner not wanting to tell his name and just staring at me”.
“Well, if they want to try to manipulate, I can play that game too. [I] gave every known body signal there is telling of lies … covered my mouth, scratched my elbow, looked away and so on.”
No charges have been filed. I’m not sure there’s anything wrong with what he did.
Here’s a good article on what he did; it was published just before the arrest.
Why is this news? The Russian company Elcomsoft has ported password cracking software to a graphics card, boosting speed by 25 times.
The Utah company AccessData has been doing this sort of thing much longer, and has way better technology.
Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.